Tag: Board game

Yet another easy, quick and very clever game: your only goal in Blokus is to place all your tiles on the board, and the only restriction is that they must touch your other tiles, but only by a corner. Oh, and three other people are trying to do the same and get in your way.

What is your name? – Sir Meepalot.
What is your quest? – The search for the Holy Grail.
What is the poker hand you need to beat me? – I don’t know tha AAARRRGGH!
And it is through the magic of the internet that you have been reading this text in Monty Python voices inside your head. Oh, you wanted to know about Shadows over Camelot?

If there’s anything everyone knows about Lemmings, it’s that they have suicidal tendencies and enjoy the occasional long walk towards a short cliff. That’s what six scientists thought when making a bet about whose lemmings would leap further. Initially, the rodents proved more sane than the scientists in question, but a few generations of genetic tampering later, the Lemmings were happily leaping. Or being eaten by eagles, dead is dead.

Do you like the Chinese Ghost Story movies? How about cooperative games? Now roll this to things into one, how does that sound? Ghost Stories is exactly that: you defend a small village from the forces of Wu-Feng who is about to rise from the dead.

Havana is a card game with some extra goodies. The goal is to restore the city of Havana to its pre-revolution glory. Action cards are a valuable resource because, once discarded, they only come back when you used them all. Turn order play a big role and is not easy to manage. And worst of all, it’s tied to the actions you can take.

Kingpin is a two-player strategy game about crime syndicates at war: with limited time, space and people you try to overrun the enemy’s HQ or take control of the central No Man’s Land. It’s not as easy as it sounds, there is more thinking involved than you might expect.

Bazaar is a genuine classic: the first edition dates back to 1967, and it still has its fair share of followers today. It’s a game about buying carpets with different-coloured gems, which you either roll for or trade for others. But despite a theme being present, it’s more an abstract strategy game than anything else.

Thousands of years ago, the Archaean empire was at the height of its power. They created four artefacts that could control the very elements. But power, as everyone learns sooner or later, is no guarantee for survival. And so it is, a long time later, a small group of modern-day adventurers that set out to retrieve the legendary treasures from the Forbidden Island.

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Older Reviews

Ah, Bohemia, land of the dice, where the fate of whole families hinges on a few rolls of the metaphorical bones. The locals didn’t mention anything about that when we passed through on our vacation, but it’s probably one of those things you don’t discuss with outsiders. Being a village boy myself, I can relate to that. When someone passed through our village, we also didn’t tell him who’s life had been ruined by the dice. But in Bohemia, or at least in Reiner Stockhausen’s Bohemian Villages, the dice have a much more direct influence on the not-quite-meeple-people’s lives. The dice decide what career they can take and sometimes to which village they have to move.

The problems with building pyramids don’t start with stacking big stones on top of other big stones. Sure, that’s one problem, but when you get to that point you solved a couple of other things already. Like how to get big stones when all you see around is sand. That part of the operation is the focus of Phil Walker-Harding’s Imhotep: get stones from the quarries down the Nile and to the construction sites, on ships you have to share with other architects working on the same project.

The new world leaders after the 1984 revolution: Pandas, Eagles, Frogs, Bears and Pigs. You may or may not be surprised to learn that, other than the species, nothing has changed. The world is struggling in a five-way Cold War, permanently on the brink of thermonuclear destruction, and your goal in this game is not to save the world and bring lasting peace – except maybe by eliminating the competition. 1984: Animal Farm may be one of the games least conductive to maintaining friendship since Diplomacy.

Ad Astra is not quite a board game, it skips the concept of a game board and makes the table top the playing area. There is some mechanics from Settlers of Catan there, some from Puerto Rico and a bit from Robo Rally, all combined to a delicious mix

Haggis the card game has about as much to do with the Scottish national dish as Tichu the Chinese card game has with China. Haggis the card game does have a whole lot to do with Tichu the card game, but with enough differences to make it an interesting game although you might know Tichu already.

The stars have aligned again to allow the Great Old Ones, beings of such immense power that we are like insects to them, to stir in their slumber. Their cultists, madmen who would do anything for power, may be able to awaken them. Only a few people, those who stumbled upon their conspiracy by accident, may still be able to stop them. With no help from the rest of the world, for who would believe their tales, they must try to prevent the end of the world.

Expensive game components, the final frontier for board game publisher. These are the games of Victory Point Games. Their continuing mission: to bring you new games, to seek out new authors, new genres, to boldly ship their games in a ziploc bag.
You guessed it, Final Frontier is a science fiction game that keeps referencing a certain TV series. But is a good theme and paper components in a ziploc game enough to make a great game?